County Seeks to Imitate Water-Quality Plan

SINCE 2002, Connecticut has reduced the amount of nitrogen being released into the Long Island Sound by allowing its 79 sewage-treatment plants to trade pollution credits.

Under the program, plants facing costly improvements to meet federal nitrogen reduction requirements can spend less by buying credits. Those credits are created by plants that are able to more easily meet requirements. In 2006, 27 plants earned from $869 to $393,000 in the credit program and resulted in a net reduction of nitrogen being released into the Sound.

“We are excited about water-quality trading,” said Benjamin H. Grumbles, the assistant administrator for water at the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which honored Connecticut last month for the program.

“We view it as a way to reduce transaction costs and increase environmental results,” he said.

Officials in Westchester County view it the same way and would like a similar opportunity. For much of the past year, they have been pressing the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to consider a trading program as a way to reduce significantly the amount of nitrogen released by the county’s four waste-water treatment plants. The state has so far refused.

“Connecticut’s got it right; New York has got it wrong,” said Larry S. Schwartz, deputy county executive in Westchester. “What the State Department of Environmental Conservation is asking the County of Westchester to do is misguided and wrongheaded.”

Under a 2001 agreement with the E.P.A., New York and Connecticut must reduce the amount of nitrogen discharged into the Sound by 58.5 percent by 2014. Nitrogen is one of the primary causes of hypoxia — low levels of dissolved oxygen that each summer makes hundreds of square miles of habitat unsuitable in the Sound, damaging fish and plant life. Nitrogen comes from sources like fertilizer and animal feces picked up by storm water runoff, but waste water flowing into the Sound has been identified as a primary factor.

To meet the terms of the agreement, the states analyzed how much nitrogen would need to be removed from the waste stream and established a base for reducing input.

In the five years trading has been conducted in Connecticut, baseline discharges of nitrogen have been reduced to 34,000 pounds a day, from 50,000 pounds a day, with the goal being 18,500 by 2014. State officials estimate that the trading program — the largest of its kind in the nation, according to Mr. Grumbles of the E.P.A. — will save $200 million to $400 million, and that the total cost of reducing the state’s nitrogen discharge may ultimately be more than $800 million.

Environmental officials in New York say that carrying out a trading program among the 23 waste-water treatment plants throughout the state involved in the agreement with the E.P.A. would be much more difficult than in Connecticut, particularly for Westchester, which is the second-largest contributor to the problem, after New York City. It would be hard for the county to find other municipalities to trade with.

“There is not a supplier of nitrogen credits in this basin that could satisfy the requirements that Westchester has to satisfy,” said James DeZolt, assistant director in the State Division of Water.

In New York, each waste-water treatment plant must reduce its nitrogen output to agreed upon levels. In Westchester, county officials say, the cost of making the improvements necessary to meet those requirements would cost $355 million to $573 million, with only taxpayers in the affected sewer districts footing the bill.

Mr. Schwartz argued that the county’s four treatment plants contributed less than 1 percent of all nitrogen discharged from the Long Island Sound Watershed and that it made no sense for them to have to reduce their nitrogen emissions by at least 58.5 percent.

“We are all for protecting Long Island Sound, but you’ve got to balance that over what people can afford to pay,” he said.

State officials counter that although Westchester’s contribution may be only 1 or 2 percent, its plants are closest to areas of high concentrations of hypoxia, and some areas most affected are along the shoreline.

Mr. DeZolt said that while plants in other parts of the state, including in New York City, had taken steps to reduce their nitrogen output, Westchester was still in the planning stages.

Mr. Grumbles said trading might not always be the best way to reduce pollution.

“It depends on the conditions and different types of entities that are there,” he said. “We’re not trying to force trading on to any particular area.”

Paul E. Stacey, director of planning and standards for the Connecticut Bureau of Water Protection, said it might be difficult to duplicate the state’s trading program elsewhere.

“In a lot of ways, we had an ideal situation,” he said. “Four facilities might make it more difficult to trade. You really need the market, and we have plants of different sizes. We were lucky.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page 14WE7 of the New York edition with the headline: County Seeks to Imitate Water-Quality Plan. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe